Ashon Crawley

“We have forgotten that black gospel music was fashioned by the courageous inventiveness of black migrants from Southern states to places like Chicago and Detroit. The style they created had within it a political and economic critique of racial capitalism: One need only peruse the lyrical content about joblessness, motherlessness, despair, to see it. But we forget that this lyrical content, like what Zora Neale Hurston said about the Sanctified Church, was also sounded out in a register that marked its difference from established Christian denominations. In this way, black gospel was not fundamentally about utopian otherworldliness and the sweet by-and-by, even when the lyrics were.”